S. Farrell - A Magic of Twilight

With the touch, she dropped the covering with a gasp.

In the instant her fingertip grazed the canvas, she thought she’d

felt warmth like that of a living face, and she would have sworn that she heard a voice, a distant call just on the edge of recognition. But all the sensations were gone as swiftly as they had come. Ana took several steps back from the painting, cradling her hand to her green robes and staring at the telltale hint of pigment on her forefinger.

The door opened, and the Archigos and Kraljica emerged. “. . understand each other,” the Kraljica was saying. The paint is still drying; that’s why it was warm. And I heard the Kraljica’s voice as they approached the door. . Ana smiled at them: as if she’d been waiting patiently, as if she’d overheard nothing they’d said.

“Renard’s brought some refreshments,” she said to them. “Would either of you care for tea?”

Karl ci’Vliomani

“Hsst! Here-quickly!”

Karl had come to the address on the note Mahri had given him-a street that was barely more than an alleyway in the snarled

depths of Oldtown. Only a few people were about, none of them near him. Mahri’s voice came from a shadowed archway. His hand beckoned from the slit of the door. Karl moved toward the door, and it opened wide enough to allow him entry before closing again.

He could smell the beggar as his eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness: mildew, soiled clothing, rotting teeth. Then he heard the click of the door shutting, and light flooded the room. Mahri spoke a word that Karl did not understand, and light streamed from Mahri’s hand: in his cupped palm, a glass orb gleamed with light so bright that Karl shielded his eyes. The light itself was intense, but it illuminated only a globe around them; the rest of the room was dark, and the light-impossibly-cast no shadows. In the harsh, bluish illumination Karl could see Mahri’s face, the torn, ravaged, and scarred landscape that the cowl usually masked. He took a step backward, away from Mahri and outside the globe of light, and night returned, shot through with afterimages of remembered glare. The effect was startling. He couldn’t see Mahri at all, nor the globe of light. They were. . gone.

He stepped forward again to where Mahri had been standing. . and sunlight dawned once more, caught in Mahri’s hand.

Karl shook his head, stunned. The quickness of the spell didn’t startle him; that was a Numetodo trick, after all, one that the teni couldn’t match with their slow chants. But the spell itself. . “That’s. . Well, that’s truly marvelous, Mahri. You’re a teni, then, or were once?”

Mahri laughed at that, a dry and strangled chuckling. “No. Not a teni.”

Karl frowned. “A Numetodo? If so, then-”

Mahri interrupted Karl before he could finish the statement. “Could you do this, Envoy, you or any Numetodo you know?”

“No,” Karl admitted. “My own skills are. . more limited. I’ve still much to learn before I would claim to have mastered the Scath Cumhacht. But I’ve known a few who, back in Paeti. .” He stopped. “No, I don’t think they could have done that, either.”

Mahri nodded. “I’m not Numetodo. But let us say that I have sympathy for your cause. And one doesn’t master the Ilmodo or the Scath Cumhacht or whatever you wish to call it. It always, in the end, masters you.” From outside, there was the sound of carriage wheels and hooves on cobblestones. Mahri tightened his fingers around the globe, and the light it cast dimmed appreciably. “Follow me,” Mahri told Karl. “Stay close to me or you’ll lose the light-the stairs are steep and narrow.”

Staying close to the man’s back, Karl shuffled behind Mahri to an archway, then along a short corridor. The interior of the building was shabby and rundown, with walls broken and rat-holed. He heard the slithering of the creatures in the walls as they passed. At the end of the corridor was a staircase, as steep and narrow as Mahri had advertised; they ascended, then turned into a room directly above the one he’d entered on the ground floor. A feral cat streaked along the wall and out a window as they came in. Mahri extinguished the light entirely, thrusting the globe somewhere in his tattered robes. “Come here, Envoy,” he said.

In the dim light from the quartered moon, Karl could see Mahri beckoning to him from alongside a window with the shutters half-open.

A chair was set just to one side, where someone could watch the street but not be noticed. Karl went to the window and glanced down. A covered, four-person carriage had stopped on the street below at the house next to theirs. Two lanterns mounted on the sides pooled light on the street. The driver had dismounted from his seat and gone to the carriage doors. “Vajica Francesca ca’Cellibrecca-you would know her face?” Karl nodded. “Then watch. You’ll only have a moment.”

The driver opened the carriage doors, and Karl leaned forward, squinting into the night. “That’s not her,” he said as the driver helped down a woman, plainly dressed, and thinner and decidedly shorter than Vajica ca’Cellibrecca, but the woman immediately turned back to the carriage, and he realized she was a servant. Another woman, with an ornate feathered hat and a fur draped around her shoulders, took the driver’s hand and descended from the carriage. As she reached the street and the two women began to hurry toward the door of the house next door, she lifted her face up to the buildings and the dim light of the carriage lamps slid over her features.

“Yes. That’s the Vajica,” Karl said.

“I know,” Mahri answered. “Now get comfortable and wait a bit.

The A’Kralj will come.”

Karl watched the women enter the house as the carriage that had brought them drove off again, then turned back toward the beggar.

“How soon. .” he began, then realized that he was talking to no one.

Mahri wasn’t in the room.

“Mahri?” There was no answer. Karl sighed, sat in the chair by the window and waited.

There was little to watch. The lane, off the main streets, had little traffic, locals walking from their apartments to unknown destinations or appointments, or returning with a sack of greens or a long loaf of bread. Very occasionally, a hired carriage would pass, but none stopped.

He could smell woodsmoke nearby and heard the whistle of an utilino shrilling alarm and saw a wan glow on the bottoms of the clouds from a few blocks away. He hoped the fire-teni were close by to put out the blaze-Oldtown feared fire more than anything. Some time later, the glow subsided; maybe half a turn of the glass, maybe more: the fire-teni had arrived and snuffed out the blaze. Karl was nearly ready to give up his vigil when he saw a man dressed in a dark cloak hurrying down the street. Something about the man’s gait and bearing struck him; when the man stopped across from the house, he pushed the cowl back from his head. There was no mistaking the thrusting chin nor the fine features of his face-Karl had seen them in paintings and glimpsed them a few times at public ceremonies in the city: it was the A’Kralj. Karl leaned forward to watch him go to the door of the house. He didn’t knock-the door opened as he approached and he went in.

“They meet three times a week.” Karl jumped at the sound of Mahri’s voice, turning to see the man standing a bare stride from him. “Always the same days, always the same time, always for the same length of time. The A’Kralj has his matarh’s habit of punctuality and ritual. One might suspect that the A’Kralj performs the same acts in the same way each time as well. Nessantico runs on routine, after all.”

“You might warn a person before you sneak up on them.”